pacmd is especially useful in scripting, though may not replace pactl completely. The biggest advantage is its shell mode, when started without arguments - for comparison, pactl supports only event listening. However, it's big issue, that pacmd is available only in pulseaudio-daemon rather than minimal (client) pulseaudio package, required for pulseaudio clients (unlike pactl). This may be problem on attempt to try pipewire instead. I remember there are packages, installed by parts from same source package, e.g. qt modules. Same could be done for pacmd. I just just did not check if pacmd really works with 'pipewire -c pipewire-pulse.conf ' instance (though pactl works, so I see no clear reasons why it should not). Reproducible: Always
Please use pactl with pipewire instead, this is provided with media-libs/libpulse client library package. Since only pulseaudio daemon implements required pacmd protocol, packaging pacmd separately has no value.
